Month: April 2018

This one was quite large.  I was talking tough.  I was telling it “give me your best shot, tough guy”.  Literally.  I know, it’s like bad movie dialogue, but I don’t know what to say.  I felt reasonably sure it couldn’t hurt me, and it didn’t. I was telling it it belonged in hell, and it was hissing quite a bit at me.  It was not happy.  I am blogging because I did not want to go immediately back to bed.

I am feeling, though, that it is past time I grew up and dealt with my fear of death.  According to my own beliefs, it is irrational.  And even if I am wrong, even if that is it, I will never know.  The universe will simply turn its slow rotations without me.  But that is not what I feel to be true.  I have seen too much not to believe in higher and invisible powers of various sorts.

I do think I perhaps get a bit too arrogant for my own good sometimes.  But I also feel I was born to fight, and this can be a symptom. Battle is not for timid people who lack faith in themselves and their skills.

Well, back to bed.  I will report anything interesting.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/03/19/darpa-wants-to-connect-human-brains-and-machines/

Is there anywhere a thirst for global peace, among people who are not naive lunatics?  All weapons, once developed, exist, and can be used by small groups.  All our technology makes asymetrical warfare more effective.  It makes us less safe, over the long haul, since once created it can be duplicated.  Every quantum leap forward might one day be used against us.

Why not establish a Commission on Global Peace, which looks carefully, honestly, and long term ways at how we disempower the war mongers, and create a lasting global peace?

To be sure, I am no believer in commissions, in general, which can only be as good as the people in them, but the GOAL symbolized by such a thing would be worthwhile.

Can we not make a lasting peace with China?  On some level do not some large number of their leaders want a better life for their children and their nation?  Would it not help if they did not need to maintain a large military?  Would it not help if they were not forced to wage an internal civil war against all the enemies of their tyranny?  Could they not perhaps be persuaded to rationalize and reform their internal repression if they could be convinced the United States will never be their military enemy?

And Russia: avoiding war with them is as easy as keeping the globalists away from the buttons of power.

Yes, there are random terrorists, but this is a war of information, not tanks and fighter planes.

Can we not make this an explicit goal, and can we not meet regularly with those who might be our enemies–who might justify the development of robotic squids, and weaponized microdrones, of armed robots, and everything else I don’t know about and have not yet imagined–and ask them what needs to happen for a lasting peace?

Yes, I am absolutely with the “trust but verify” camp, but Reagan oversaw a LARGE decrease in overall armaments, did he not?

Edit: I was also referencing this: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/04/18/army-researchers-are-developing-a-self-aware-robot-squid-you-can-3d-print-in-the-field/

I never know what will happen to me when I fall asleep.  My shaking, screaming, verbalizing and all that are slowly diminishing in amplitude, which has been the goal.  They are not absent, but they have softer edges now.  I can’t quite recall if they happened last night at all, in fact.  This is progress.

But my awareness in my sleep seems to be increasing.  I am doing work while I am sleeping.  It’s piecemeal, haphazard work.  Images and ideas appear to me, in no order.

For example, last night I saw an image of a man I’ve known some time, and came to realize that the whole of his long life has been strongly conditioned by how he was potty trained, so many years ago.  Large systems form from small things.  Freud was not wrong about this. An entire Lebensgestalt can be inferred, sometimes, from the type of soap someone uses.

And I saw how Neurofeedback, one day soon, might be used as a tool for increasing love.  I saw a man and a woman, in a virtual reality space, sharing the visual readouts of the part of their brains which create beauty, love and connection, and merging these images in wonderful ways, in real time.

And it must be said, that the gift of love is much more strongly given to women, in general.  Men are often confused in relationships with women (and, I would suppose, with each other, both in hetero and homosexual ways) because this language does not come naturally to us.  Protectiveness comes naturally.  Sexuality comes naturally.  Love does not.  It is a sort of foreign language in some ways, that we learn to speak with varying degrees of fluency over time, to the continual frustration of women, who cannot understand this.  We say we love women, sometimes, because we have to, but a very large number of us (I feel) are not entirely sure what it is we are supposed to be feeling.  It feels good being with the woman, and we call this love.  This is quite sufficient to get married and have kids, but perhaps not sufficient to stay married in a great many cases.  Statistically, this seems a reasonable statement to make.

And finally I was dreaming about the Rust Belt.  I was up there last week, in a Union town, or what used to be a Union town.  I got in and out without incident, which would likely not have been possible 30 years ago.

I have long blamed the decline of Detroit and everything attached to it to greedy Union bosses, and stupid members.  But what I saw was that there is also a CULTURAL element to this whole thing.  Unions make people feel like they belong.  They are not quite a church, but not quite not a church either.  I know around here, the third shift workers go drink in the Union Hall parking lot when they get off at 5am or so, until the local bar opens at 6am.  There they all are, sitting in the dark, with six packs they brought in coolers. It’s a fellowship, of sorts.

So giving up all that, or risking giving up all that, through Right to Work legislation–or through the types of concessions needed to keep jobs local–is probably LEAST of all an economic risk.  It is a lifestyle risk.  I had not seen that.

On many accounts, the dead live among us.  One of the more interesting ones, from, as I recall, an Eagle Scout and man who became a psychiatrist, is Return from Tomorrow.  The dead can walk through walls, travel at infinite speeds, fly, and are invisible.  Such is my own belief, at any rate, as it applies to spirits who don’t go somewhere better.

Imagine a spy program where recruits are taught all the elements of observation, what to look for, what to take an interest in, then shot to death for graduation.  Imagine such a thing making sense if there were some established means of maintaining contact with them.

This would, if you will pardon the term, be a living spy program.  We could focus on what is essential.  We would not need to capture all elements of every last action of every last human on Earth.

I wonder about a program for precognition too.  How would that work?  If you can “see” the future, can you change it?  This is an old question, asked many times in many science fiction and fantasy novels.

I watched “Edge of Tomorrow” last week, and pondering it, it occurred to wonder what happened to the woman each time after she shot Tom Cruise.  You don’t see those shots.  You just see him getting shot over and over.  Does she look at him, as his lifeless body bleeds out, call a medic to transport him away, then pack off and die the next day every time?  Is each of these events a new universe?   Some physicists would say yes, which means that the real woman (I forget her name, rank, and the actresses name) actually dies thousands of times.  So too does the “real” Tom Cruise, except that some part of his consciousness transitions between universes.  What is he, if his body stops in time, but his mind moves?  I will say that, as a major movie star (as they say) he has over the years picked a lot of conceptually interesting movies, like Vanilla Sky, this one, and Oblivion.

As I think I’ve mentioned–over some time horizon I have probably mentioned EVERYTHING which recurs for me–I have telekinetic powers in my dreams.  I was playing with some bits of paper last night in a dream–moving them around in clouds of different shapes–and it occurred to me that my real arm is actually hollow.  This thought occurred to me in the dream, as I was looking at my dream arm, which was semi-translucent. The matter within it is, from a strictly empirical perspective, nearly as empty as empty space.  The apparent presence of something solid is a sort of electromagnetic trick, when in reality all the molecules within my arm are nearly all empty space.  When we lift something with our limbs, we are practicing, therefore, a species of telekinesis.  All the other kind is is realizing we don’t need what look like arms.  We can project onto space, and to a great extent, control it.

I’m not quite sure what I am saying, but there is truth in it, I feel reasonably certain.  I felt it strongly.

I was pondering the letter Paul Griffiths wrote, where he recommended 3 hours a day devoted to study.  And it occurred to me I spend at least an hour a day in meditation.  Does that count?

Then it occurred to me that, while I have long called myself a “thought worker”, that the term “perception worker” might be more apt for my aspirations.

When you spend an hour living at the level of sensation and subtle affect, you are not thinking.  There are no words.  This is the point: you get beyond thoughts by focusing on the body.

Within the Greek tradition most of our intellectuals live in, there is little room for this sort of activity.  We think of intellectuals as the sorts of people who privilege ideas roughly the way Socrates and Plato did.  But there is so much more, so much that can be perceived, but not spoken.  One can speak of the “unspeakable”, and one can incorporate the “unspeakable” into a philosophical system, but one cannot LIVE it without living it; and having lived it, one can justifiably wonder about the relative importance of ideas for a life well lived, compared to everything that is beyond, outside the fence.

You have to have room for “that”.  “That” has to suffice for some statements, some communications, some understandings, conveyed personally and face to face.

I was sitting in the sauna today, and got to wondering what treating the body literally like a machine might look like.

You could step into some sort of device in the morning which would inject some drug that rendered you unconscious.  Then your muscles could be stimulated in some fashion that mimicked weight lifting physiologically.  Your heart and lungs could be exercised.  You could be tanned, and you could be put through a sauna to improve your vascular health.  All this, without any conscious effort on your part.  You wake up, and the health maintenance part of your day is complete.

Would you assent to such a thing?  Many people would.  They resent effort and work.  They have been bred–that is the word for many–to feel that life without work would be better, and that life with work is drudgery.

But life IS work.  Even love is work, is it not, at least when done over the long term?  Are not all the small moments that make up a life found in the little things, the drudgery, the looking-to-the-other-side through what often seems monotonous, difficult, and dull?

If we are our work, then this machine would be terrible.  Every rep of every exercise I do is a little different.  Every time I stretch it feels a little different.  All these nuances are what create affective and cognitive complexity and what make a mind and self interesting.  People bred to use machines of this sort would be difficult to differentiate from cattle, other than in their use of language.

I know the NSA captures everything, but it would be quite impossible for humans to read everything they get, so I thought I might flag myself, in the event I am not a regular stop on the “keeping an eye on the people” circuit.

NSA employee: do you get that you won’t be needed in the system you are creating, within ten to fifteen years?  Has this occurred to you?  That at some point your present position on the inside might become a position on the outside?  AI will be able to do what you do, without any risk of “Snowden”-ing, which might become more and more likely as the planned tyranny gets closer and tighter.  Right now, perhaps you see yourself preventing a nuclear attack, or chemical attack, or biological attack.  Fair enough.  But what else are you enabling?  Who is watching you, and the people you work for?  What could be done with the NSA if one person using AI could run the whole thing?  What if, in fact, it were fully automated?

Here is the thing: we can’t stop technology, absent a global “event” of some sort.  It will keep creeping along, no matter who is in the White House, and no matter what rules we create and try to enforce.  Too many people want to be sorcerers.

BUT, what we can do–and this is the only way to “flank” the future and overcome the bad that is otherwise our destiny–is embed God and the afterlife within formal science as practiced in universities the world over.

The NSA employs a lot of geniuses.  Why not join Edison, but from a VASTLY more advanced place, and create better EVP devices than we have today?  Why not employ this brilliance to something other than a robotic and automated, pointless existence?

If the machines win, that IS the apocalypse, is it not?  No more human life on Earth?  All dead?

It is an interesting fact that our government, purely for pragmatic reasons, has in fact played with what I might term aspects or signs of God.  We have funded, and found success in, Remote Viewing and, in my understanding, precognition.  If one such thing is possible, why not all of them?  If the mind’s eye can travel the Earth’s surface at will, why not an underlying spirit without a body?

Here is the core question you need to answer in depth, if you are not already a psychopath (in which case, I CAN’T talk to you): what are you protecting?

https://www.infowars.com/bill-gates-backs-a-1-billion-plan-to-cover-earth-in-big-brother-satellites-capable-of-streaming-live-and-unfiltered-hd-footage-of-the-planet/

500 is a good start on such a project.  More will be needed for a perfect surveillance planet.  Think about it: a set of behavioral algorithms could easily be developed and enforced through automation.  We could have robot cops tied to a surveillance grid with no gaps anywhere on the planet, which act based upon rules which never vary, and which they cannot vary.  We can be tied into as small a grid as the programmers see fit, and most of the programmers are psychopaths who aspire, themselves, to be brains in vats connected to everything, omnipotent, and omniscient.

The coffee has been brewed.  It’s been on the hot plate a while.

But of course, Brittany Spears or Beyonce, or one of the Kardashians, and of course the PARAMOUNT NEED to “get rid of guns”, because, you know, kids who nothing obviously know more than the rest of us, or than those who study the history of humanity and its many tangible and nameable errors.

Sun Tzu, some two thousand years ago, or something like that, wrote something close to “I have heard of clumsy military campaigns which were conducted quickly, but never a protracted campaign that was conducted skillfully.”

Now, they did not have the concept of “nation building” back then.  You conquered your enemies, enslaved, slaughtered, beat them down or simply took their stuff and left, as you saw fit, then you were done.  You might install your puppets as their rulers, but nobody on any side was confused enough to think that the conquest was a liberation, or that subjugation was for the conquereds own good.

Come to think of it, the “revolutionary” (most revolutions, so called, being planned events fomented by and used by autocratic agents of autocratic regimes) aims of most Communist regimes might be seen as a logical extension of the “White Man’s Burden”.

Be all that as it may, what would Sun Tzu make of a war being fought half a world away, where we oppose both sides in a civil war which doesn’t involve us in any way?  Stupid?  Yes, I think stupid is the word he would use.

Corrupt is another word he might use.  Ponder the NEW “Economic Consequences of the Peace”.  Ponder what would happen to, what could be done with, the many hundreds of billions of dollars we spend a year on “defense”, most of which happens in nations many thousands of miles from our shores.  What if North Korea makes its peace with South Korea, and we can permanently draw down our troops?  What is the Iranians then also see the light of day, and begin a slow march in the direction of lightening the load their tyranny places on ordinary Iranians?

What if all our great wars suddenly either end, or need a radically different sort of war, which does not involve large numbers of troops, deployed seemingly indefinitely everywhere but America?

I don’t read many bestsellers, but I did read one Jack Reacher, “The Enemy”.  The gist of it was that senior Army Generals were conspiring to keep the war business alive.  It as a fictional novel, but is that really such an unreasonable plot line?  Eisenhower, a Republican, and former career General–one of the few 5 Stars we have had–was the one who warned of the “military-industrial complex”.

Alex Jones has managed to make “Deep State” a phrase used by “ordinary” people.  For my own purposes, I would just like to call it “The System”.  The system has many beneficiaries, many two way relationships, many angles.  As with any complex arrangement, you have many competing demands, many agendas, many egos, many views. 

However, I think one of the CORE needs of the System is that everyone keep their words between certain lines.  There are certain places you aren’t supposed to go.  Calling the FBI corrupt for example, is not allowed, for the simple reason that it is TRUE, and that the FBI can both make and break people.  If you are their friend, they can do for you what they did for Hillary and others.  If you are their enemy, well, they can pretend that the law doesn’t apply to them, find sympathetic judges, and pretty much get away with anything, all while being supported strongly by the media components of the System.

Trump can pardon Cohen, and he might not even need to, if they can find judges who still find value in the ideals underlying the Constitution.  And Trump can counterattack.  I think he has been a bit off balance since he took office, since he is being attacked by all sides continually, and you can’t fire everyone at the same time.  This, of course, was the intent.

And we need to be clear that the System has scored some recent points.  The vitiation of lawyer-client privilege, as well as Executive Privilege, is a significant victory for the opponents of reason and democracy.

But I can’t help but FEEL, and this is only a feeling, that people are starting to see the outlines of this ugly monster as it steps further and further out of the shadows.  It was possible to believe the FBI was a stand-up organization a year ago.  That is no longer possible, particularly after the Cohen raid.  These are slimy people, capable of anything.  Not all of them obviously.  No organization is COMPLETELY corrupt.  There were good Nazis, presumably.  But the people running it, the people making decisions for it, ARE corrupt, and that is the only good way to see it, in my view.  Same with the CIA, as far as I can tell.  The IRS probably depends on the bureau, but the parts which are most relevant to political persecution I think we can assume are filled with Obama partisans who think the law is merely a temporary delaying device, and unwanted annoyance.

We can hope people start to wake up.  It is far past the time, if it ever existed, when it was useful to yell at Leftists.  You can’t reason with dogs by barking back at them.  And you are stupid if you take it personally.  They yell and bark at everyone.

But the cards are on the table.  I can’t help but believe there remain people like Alan Dershowitz willing to say “You know what, I hate Trump and hate his policies, but this is bullshit.”.  There is no reason not to try to educate such people gently, and as persuasively as possible.

If you think about it, America is fighting both sides in a civil war where both sides are regularly committing atrocities of various sorts.  Nothing less desirable could be imagined.  Why we are there, I don’t know.  What we are trying to accomplish, other than destroying ISIS–as a training and motivational arm of the lunatic fringe of Islam–in Syria, I don’t know.